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Drinking Liberally Cincinnati

One of the problems with an encyclopedia-style reference website that is maintained by the public is, well, the public gets to decide what information gets included on the website. This is the kind of problem that has plagued Wikipedia over the years, but grad student Virgil Griffith is making it easier to monitor those who try to put false and misleading information on Wikipedia.

Thanks to his new WikiScanner website, you can now see which organizations are making which edits to pages on Wikipedia. This has identified some very unusual editing habits; changes made to pages about companies and corporations are often entered by disgruntled employeesat their work computers! Clearly these people don't understand how cache files and IP addresses work.

Not surprisingly though, one of the biggest offenders has been Fox Propaganda Channel. Employees at the smear organization have gone in and edited the pages of Al Franken and Keith Olbermann to make them seem "out of step" with the mainstream. The link contains multiple examples of what they did. Normally this would be a major concern for a journalistic organization, but as Fox recently admitted, Hannity and O'Reilly are not journalists, so that's not a concern for them.